Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies

Congratulations to Ph.D. candidate Zachary Torrano, recipient of a highly competitive and prestigious Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award! Zack's proposal, "Using three isotope systems (Cr, Ti, and O) to address two important questions in planetary science via one sample suite of ungrouped chondrites: 3, 2, 1, Go!", was…

Ph. D. Candidate Soumya Ray was recently featured on the Women Doing Science Instagram and Twitter feeds.  The posts include a brief description of Ray's research in the Center for Meteorite Studies and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in addition to photos of her work in both the meteorite collection and laboratory. Women Doing…

Thuathe is an ordinary (H4/5) chondrite that fell in Lesotho the afternoon of July 21, 2002. According to the Meteoritical Bulletin (MB 87), the meteorite exploded over Lesotho, approximately 12 km east of the capital city of Maseru. The explosion was accompanied by an extraordinarily loud, 15 s long noise which was heard over a…

Ibitira is an achondrite (Eucrite-mmict) that fell in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the evening of June 30, 1957. According to the Meteoritical Bulletin (MB 6): The fireball passed northwestward and accompanied with a noise like the reverberation of thunder has been observed. This phenomenon has been marked in the radius about 160 km. At the end…

On April 23 at 9:09 p.m. local time, residents of Aguas Zarcas, a small town in Costa Rica, saw a large “fireball” in the sky. The reported fireball was a meteor about the size of a washing machine. As it entered Earth’s atmosphere, it broke apart and rained hundreds of meteorites in and around the small…